Fantasy Production

Sexual Economies and Other Philippine Consequences for the New World Order

Neferti Xina M. Tadiar

Publication Year: 2004

Taking an innovative, postcolonial, feminist perspective on transformations in the Philippine nation in the context of globalization, Fantasy-Production provides a theoretical framework for understanding the nationalist and postcolonial capitalist logics shaping the actions of the Philippines as a nation-state.

Contents

Acknowledgments

Introduction: Dreams

Of what consequence are Philippine dreams? Shortly after the deposing
of the Philippine dictator Ferdinand Marcos and his family in 1986, a
home videotape of a carousing party held on their yacht made the
rounds of the same televisions around the world that had just aired
the four-day carnival of their fall. We are the World,' sang the Marcoses ...

PART I Fantasy-Production: Bodily Resources and Libidinal Dynamics of National Crisis and Development

There is a story that I first heard in the Philippines a long while
back.1 It goes something like this: Do you know the origins of
the American national anthem? Well, when Jose Rizal (the
Philippine national hero) went to the United States, he wanted to watch
that all-American game, baseball. But when he got to the stadium there ...

1 Sexual Economies

This chapter is comprised of two interventions at two different
historical moments, each marked by a pivotal US-led 'world' war.1 The
first intervention was made in the context of the 1991 Gulf War and its
fantasy of a New (Free) World Order composed of peaceful, prosperous
regional communities of 'free' nations. The second intervention issues ...

2 Metropolitan Dreams

The construction of flyovers, that is, overpasses at
major interchanges, is the response of the Department of Public Works
and Highways (DPWH) to the massive congestion of traffic caused by
an ever-increasing population (estimated to be around 10 million). It
is, in other words, a state as well as corporate2 measure to cope with ...

3 Domestic Bodies

In the mid 1990s, reports of the exploitation, abuse and torture of
Filipina domestic workers working in countries such as Hong Kong,
Singapore, Saudi Arabia, Kuwait and the United Arab Emirates
increasingly flooded Philippine newspapers. Headlines such as 'Filipina
OCW Slain in Kuwait Tortured,' 'Filipino Maid Accuses WHO Exec of ...

In spite of the well-known and highly debated Fukuyama
proclamation that we, the world, have reached the end of history,
'history' continues to make its appearance whenever there is talk
of or feeling about the nation. Such talk and feeling, in which 'history'
figures prominently, are never so fervent, so abundant, as when the ...

4 Revolt of the Masses: National History as Psychology

Over fifty years ago, the historian Teodoro Agoncillo prefaced his just
completed work, The Revolt of the Masses: The Story of Bonifacio and
the Katipunan, with an explanation of the impossibility of writing a
biography of the Philippine revolutionary, Andres Bonifacio (Fig. 4.1):
'For the Plebian Hero, the first truly Filipino democrat, suffered from
two disadvantages. On the one hand was his lowly and obscure origin, ...

5 'People Power': Miraculous Revolt

In the last chapter, we saw the limits of a historical imagination that
draws its authoritative symbolic forms in accordance to the principles
of fantasy-production. These principles, which also serve as strictures
on our political imagination, include the privileging of the nation as
the paramount unit of world-historical action and the understanding
of the nation's actions as determined by the particular character of its ...

It is difficult to attempt to depict, much more to explain, the magnitude
of Nora Aunor's star power — the immense draw of a following that
commands its own analytical category.1 In movie critics' conversations,
the most expressive sign and irrefutable evidence of the spectacular
power of this greatest Filipina actress of all time is the hysteria of her ...

Conclusion: Hope

In Donna Haraway's critical description of the tropic role of the gene
in the reality games of technoscience — the gene as 'the alpha and
omega of the secular salvation drama of life itself — we can recognize
the workings of much larger units of human life.1 Nations, states,
peoples, cultures — these are the privileged authors of and actors in ...

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